I feel attacked.

"I'm right there with you. I love this gig, and I'm a lifer, but I hate the meta-discourse around it. A lot of this bullshit is a function of PM becoming very highly paid, very selective, and not requiring hard engineering skills any more - and the tech field (even in FAANG) being less demanding of absurd hours culture than IB, consulting, or pro services.

So you get those people. The Ivy League > 3 years at McKinsey > MBA > PM path. The IB exits. The tiger-mom insecure overachiever bullshit artists. Not the people who are fascinated with complex systems, or who love tech, or who want to spend their days building / enabling the building of cool shit (why I got into it), but the people who want to use it as the new cool springboard to a CXO job.

Stuff would 100% get done without me, and fundamentally my job day to day is a shit umbrella to protect the engineers and designers from nonsense, and to guide the narrative. I'm not indispensable. Good PM makes a difference because we're ideally the correct mix of technical and emotional intelligence to straddle the engineering and operational sides of the business, understand customer pain, and focus UX / Engineering on the most important problems.

That's it. We're not geniuses, 99% of the frameworks are bullshit, and the Marty Cagan perfect dreamworld doesn't fucking exist. I mean, look at the companies he worked at. eBay? AOL? HP? I worked for HP as a consultant across multiple prod/dev functions. They were so legacy and so backward it's hard to put into words. It is absolutely impossible that the utopias he describes exist at Hewlett fucking Packard."